Mr Simon Mortensen will speak in the innovation stream on operational forecasting of large vessel drift event in Australian waters.

Increased shipping activities and multi-use of marine spaces create challenges for regulators to enhance emergency response services to mitigate risk. Of particular interest risk related to drift groundings due to their complex nature and the lack of any suitable tool that can simulate drift trajectories of large vessels accounting for effects wind, waves and currents.

Floating vessels usually have asymmetric hulls, which generates lift forces when the vessel is moved by wind and waves. This will cause the vessel to drift on an angle to the resultant incident force direction. The phenomenon is called leeway drift and can vary significantly based on vessel type, loading, size and draft. Most previous methods have been limited to stochastic analysis of field data to provide a simplistic incorporation of leeway drift.

We present a new breed of operational numerical forecast model developed in collaboration with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is capable of accurate operational forecasting of drift trajectory and grounding risk of large commercial vessels.

Wind, current and wave induced forces and turning moments are evaluated directly on full 3D vessel hulls, which allows vessel orientation, drifting speed and leeway drift angle to be evaluated explicitly and accurately. The model accounts for separate treatment of spatially varying wind, current and wave forces such as produced by 2D and 3D forecast and hindcast models.

Stochastic treatment of key variables associated with uncertainties in predicting drifting vessel fate is incorporated directly through customized probability functions that can be modified through an open source interface. Model outputs include discrete vessel trajectories, spatial time series of position likelihood and grounding risk probability.

Model predictions have been validated with drift trajectories obtained from a controlled drift experiment using a capesize dry bulk carrier.

Mr Mortensen holds a BSc and MSc in Coastal & Marine Engineering and is lead of DHIs global business excellence centre for numerical modelling of floating structure response which is based in Australia.

He is the Marine Department Head for DHI Australia with 9 years of experience in management, model development and technical supervision of complex numerical modelling projects involving 2D and 3D hydrodynamics, wave mechanics, moored vessel interaction and sediment transport.

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